The undead army moved as one, lashing out suddenly with their hands, their claws, or their rusted and broken armaments. The fighting force of the Bosk Dagala Shood roared back, and met the decaying specters with their own show of force.

 

As the two groups clashed together, Snooze found herself reeling. 

 

She blinked back the pain, but could only watch as several of the living soldiers tried to take down one of the magically procured members of Rekvahn’s --quite literally- thatched-together army. Their blades and pummels damaged the beast, but it seemed not to care, instead, it merely waited for their initial assault clattered uselessly against it before counter attacking with the power of incredible violence. It launched into their midst and as the dust was kicked up, Snooze could hear screams.

 

Unsettling. She thought to herself, but watched then as Hal began a parry with another soldier, their blades coming together with a piercing crash. The man facing off against her was much larger, but Hal seemed as though she might have had a bit more determination in her gut, because the man--a Doa-- looked pleased and relaxed, as if he didn’t see the young girl as a threat. 

 

This was clearly a mistake.

 

He pressed his advantage, forcing Hal to grit her teeth and push back hard against her half of the gridiron sword cross, and Snooze watched as the man leaned forward, switching his stance to really drive the girl down with his strength. But as he lurched forward, that was when Hal relaxed, slid to the side, and deftly positioned herself out of the way as the man’s superior strength and mass worked against him, forcing him forward, and off balance. With a thunderous crunch, Hal brought the pommel of her sword against the back of the man’s head and he dropped hard to the ground, completely still.

 

“Hal--the finger!” Rekvahn called out, and the girl glanced down at the bygone phalange lying on the ground. 

 

She flashed the necromancer a look of disgust. It appeared as though the warrior woman had stumbled upon one of the unwritten rules of existence: that there were few things worse in the overabundance of grotesquerie that the universe could procure than a discarded bit of knuckle.

 

“What is this fell trick?” she demanded, assuming some devilish prank on the man’s behalf, but he seemed quite serious.

 

“I can reattach it!” Rekvahn shouted back.

 

The necromancer made a movement in the air that inexplicably began commanding one of his not-so-autonomous drones to tackle a nearby fleeing Brug. The oafish warrior groaned as he struck the rocky soil and attempted to extricate himself from the cold, disinterested grasp of the undead magical assailant. But his efforts were in vain, as was the furious sharpening he’d exacted upon the blade of his ax not six hours beforehand as the weapon was now stuck uselessly in the creature’s spine--a biological irrelevancy for its particular mode of motion. 

 

Months from now, a simple traveler would happen along that very sharp and shiny ax laying among the rocks, and use it to chop down a tree to start a fire for warmth. Life comes at you fast, but so does death. Because of that, much like our unfortunate friend in the rough, sometimes you just end up doing a lot of work that someone else gains the benefit of. 

 

Circle of life.

 

Dutiful Hal shrugged and scooped up the finger, tucking it into her belt. Snooze’s fingertip peeked out over the edge of the leather quite un-stylishly, swaying ever so slightly with the Brug girl’s movements. Then Hal tightened her grip on her sword, chose an enemy, and charged.

 

Mediator Viz was quite busy hurling stone after painful stone at several of the Bosk Dagala Shood not currently occupied by the performers of Rekvahn’s fabulous zombie circus. She concentrated seriously, her face scrunched into untold focus and anger as she unleashed unbridled geological fury upon the unlucky few that came within her clobbering radius. 

 

“Heathens!” She wailed, the sound of her voice nearly drowned out by the crush, thump and smash of her lapidarian whims. 

 

Snooze wasn’t exactly sure where to begin. 

 

The cacophony of chaotic calamity surrounding her made her head spin, and she found that she couldn’t focus on one thing for more than a moment. Everything swam in front of her, filtering through the lens of battle fervor: Hal’s calculated strikes and parries, Viz’s consternation and zealous rage, Rekvahn’s worrisome laughs of joy as he pummeled any visible warrior with his avalanche of decaying thralls. In the thick of it, Snooze found it was easy to understand the term “fog of war.”

 

She observed with a disconnected sadness. Her world had become so wild and out of her control. This was not at all what she’d wanted for it. Bloodshed and malice and the greed of the sentient… all things she’d hoped would never have taken root in her wonderful incubator. However, Snooze was learning, much like a father who hears his daughter call him a “big, fat, balding miserable cuss” for the first time: that which you create can become its own monstrous and pubescent animal.

 

The little god moved forward and raised her hands. She needed to put a stop to all of this very undelightful combat. She wasn’t sure exactly how she would do it, but in her mind she cycled through the various options she had available to her. 

 

Perhaps Air? She thought. Yeah, I could blast the gravy out of them and send them all flying. She thought about how difficult it might be to not also hit her friends with such a grievous wind.

 

Well, that may be out. She worked through the different spells in her mind, and with each consideration, she let the godspell energy form at the end of her remaining fingers, ready to spring it at a moment’s notice. Plantlife could wrap them up, perhaps, but she wasn’t sure if her levels were high enough in that yet. Sure, she’d been able to cocoon the good business out of Twick--who was hopefully still in a bind-- but, she didn’t know if she could control it on such a large scale. Water could work to create a deluge, but that might also just end up making an impassable stretch of mud. Plus, there were holes in the ground now, and that may have unforeseen consequences. Fire…

 

She almost laughed at the idea. It was a barren stretch of ground, and that was likely the most functionally useless Element to present. 

 

It is important to note that Snooze was forgetting one peculiarity of her current geographical position, but, well, perhaps that would be too hard on her. There was quite a lot going on, and particulars were easy to slip away from even the mightiest of us during such times of duress.

 

Wait… she suddenly thought. How am I able to keep casting these spells? I thought--

 

FLASH

 

A bright arc of blue flame sailed into view as the Second was surely back on her feet and taking great pains to come out on top in the battle. Were it not for the god considering the effectiveness of utilizing her fifth and final Ritual Element at that very moment, she would surely have been cleaved, or rather, cauterized in twain.

 

Reflexively, Snooze cast the spell dallying at her fingertips just as the flaming blade connected with her shoulder. She’d been toying with the effectiveness of utilizing Life and in what manifestation it could take form to help her most, and released it in a plume of magical energy at precisely the most opportune moment. The spell wrapped itself around the edge of the Second’s sword, and as it painfully burned and sliced its way into Snooze, it also did something remarkable.

 

It healed her. 

 

Truly, as each strand of muscle and flesh was rent, it also immediately healed, and as the Second removed her weapon, Snooze was suddenly gruesomely whole. It was more jarring than anything else, but also had the wonderfully little side effect of being ungodly agonizing. She screamed out as it happened, and then immediately grew quiet as the pain dissolved from her body. 

 

The Second, thinking she’d suddenly won her fight, watched as the wound knitted itself together so quickly that it was as if there was never an injury to begin with. Her face contorted from self-satisfied smugness to confusion to horror as she saw the extent, or lack thereof, concerning her deadly sneak attack. 

 

“How?!” the Brug woman demanded, her sword already curiously in its sheath.

 

Why does she continue to do that? Is it all for flexing purposes? Like, cool, bro, you can totally draw and sheath your sword faster than any samurai in the history of ever, but it’s gotta have a drawback. Right?

 

Snooze smiled, seeing the anger in her opponents visage and took the opportunity to cross her arms in front of her chest.

 

“You missed,” she said.

 

“I missed nothing, dreadspawn,” the Second hissed, her grip tightening, the telltale sign of an incoming strike. “You’ve bewitched yourself. A fair play to the rules of engagement, but not without its own weakness. I wonder if you can reproduce that result with a flurry of blows?”

 

Egg her on, Snooze’s seemingly disconnected inner-monologue urged. 

 

So she did.

 

“Perhaps you’re just not that strong of a warrior,” Snooze said, smirking in her most irritating manner. “They should rename you “Second Best,” since you’re clearly not capable of doing any serious damage.”

 

That seemed to work wonders on the Second’s temperament. With an anguished wail, the Blessed unleashed absolute slicey-hell. Snooze did not even attempt to dodge, instead she concentrated on pummeling the woman’s blade with as much of her Life godspell as she had available to her, holding it along the sword edge even through the pain as each strike landed perfectly on her arms, chest, legs, everywhere really. Each time, Snooze endured the torment with a clenched jaw, knowing that on the other side of each slice was the cooling pleasure of the rapidly healing wounds.

 

Snooze had been pushed back with each hit, and found that she was very close to the edge of the crater now, moving ever closer as the Second continued with her fury. Each blow came slower than the last, and Snooze could see that she was still sheathing the blade after each swing, despite the speed with which she was performing. 

 

With her strikes gaining less and less momentum as the Second’s arms were clearly feeling the exhaustion of prolonged work, Snooze saw now that each time the blade left the sheath, the flame grew in intensity, and the air around it seemed to change as well. The god was able to observe this as she received cut after cut, and it almost looked as though the area around the metal was being heated by the blue flames itself. 

 

That’s still so odd, Snooze thought, it’s almost as if she’s afraid of keeping the blade out for longer than the fraction of a second it takes to use it.

 

Then, the god suddenly got a first-row seat to the reason why her assailant was doing just that.

 

The Second missed her sheath on a put-away and the air around the two was very immediately alive. It caught fire, and then the world around them was suddenly aflame as well. The ground turned to leaping flames, traveling quickly away from them and toward the rest of the fighting, snapping along quickly and eating the closest combatant--the loud-mouth Doa. His screams were cut off by the chain reaction, and Snooze watched in horror as everything around her became an inferno. Then, she suddenly remembered: the sulfur.

 

It hadn’t ignited when she and Hal had created the cookfire, but the blue flame of the blade must have been hot enough to catch the fumes of the terrain and transform it into a tinderbox. Snooze saw Rekvahn turn, his eyes wide, as the flames made a beeline for him, consuming everything in its path. He fixed her with a look of fear and what appeared to be something akin to desperation. 

 

Snooze was afraid. That moment was all it took to send her reeling into the memory of the grassfire. This was so much worse, but the feeling was exactly the same as she watched the rolling tide of fire lick its way along the landscape. Despite the heat, her heart felt like ice and it pounded against her chest with a pain worse than any sword.

 

Snooze didn’t know what else to do, she raised her hands out to Rekvahn, wanting desperately to put an end to the destruction, and felt something building inside of her and then released.

 

Suddenly, everything froze.

 

The flames stopped moving, the heat disappeared, the assault on her person from the Second halted, even the living surrounding her were motionless. She glanced back up at Rekvahn, his face trapped in the same expression, and her eyes darted to the others and found that they too were unmoving. The Second, mid-swing, was frozen in place like a very angry statue. The whole world had just suddenly stopped.

“What did I do?” she asked aloud.

 

“You didn’t do anything,” said a familiar voice. “That was me.”

 

Snooze spun on her heel and came face-to-face with an uncomfortable sight: Xolt, otherwise known to herself only as “the dog in the hat,” stood at the edge of the crater, the little cap still tilting to the side as if defying physics. But they weren’t alone.

 

Standing next to it were two figures. A tall, feminine-presenting humanoid with small, dark eyes and a long black braid stood to Xolt’s right, and to their left was a short, pudgy blob of a thing with a single large eye in its center mass and curls of ribbon-like hair surrounding its entire body. 

 

“What the-- I told you to get out of here you dummy!” Snooze fired at Xolt, furrowing her brow and trying to look quite intimidating.

 

“Yes, well, I estimated that now might be an opportune time to return,” the dog said, its large fanged grin stretching to each floppy ear. “Unless, of course, you would like me to allow the fire to spread and consume your little ragtag bunch of freedom fighters?”

 

“I had it handled!” Snooze exclaimed, and marched forward angrily. “You oughta--”

 

“Ah-ah-ah,” Xolt warned, and Snooze stopped her advance. “Not one step further, Snooze. I can’t have you getting too close. It would make our guests extremely unsettled, and would be above all… rude. So please, if you don’t mind over-much, would you consider staying put during our conversation?”

 

Snooze chewed on this for a moment.

 

“I don’t care if your friends are scared,” she said. “You’re in my yard now, and I make the rules. You should be scared. Who knows what I’m going to do, I’m nuts!”

 

Snooze was many things, but she had not succumbed to Celestial Madness, and the dog in the hat seemed to know this, as they had had a coworker who suffered from the affliction, and Xolt knew what symptoms to look out for.

 

“I, er, doubt that,” Xolt said. “In any case, curb your anger for the moment, if you don’t mind, as we will be discussing terms.”

 

“I’m not discussing any terms with you,” Snooze returned. “I told you to go, and I meant it… and take your lawyers with you.”

 

Xolt chuckled.

 

“Ah, Snooze,” they said, quite annoyingly. “Your threats are meaningless in this place, but I do laud you for trying.”

 

That was infuriating. Snooze had not often lost her temper in this new life (though, as to her old life, we might keep tighter lips about that in particular) however, she could not help herself. Faced with the penultimate douchery that she was currently on the receiving end of, and the confusion of her predicament, she reached out, set Xolt in her sights and said one simple word.

 

“Banish.”

 

There was a pregnant nothing that happened.

 

Snooze looked at Xolt, still standing there, still smirking in a way that was so very uncomfortable. She was learning that sometimes, even dogs could have punchable faces. But she tried again.

 

“Banish,” she exclaimed, louder this time, waving her hand in front of her as if to force the motion. Still, the dog in the hat remained. 

 

“What in the--”

 

“Ah,” Xolt interrupted. “That won’t work for you. I am so very sorry.”

 

But Snooze didn’t think the dog god sounded very sorry at all. In fact, Xolt seemed downright pleased that her banishment had no effect.

 

“You see,” Xolt began, launching into the familiar state of perpetual diatribe and causing Snooze to wish very seriously for a godspell that would allow her the ability to bestow a being with diaper rash. “I am an Administrator. Specifically, I am Chief Administrator of this area. You can no more Banish me than I can… well, I can do whatever I want, actually.”

 

The dog chuckled.

 

“So, unfortunately for you, Snooze, I am very much staying put. But that only gives us more of an opportunity to chat. As I said, we will be discussing terms.”

 

Ah, butts.